A Separation

It's ok is about all you can say about it. This is written in a very cool, distancing style so never at any point is the reader allowed to feel involved in what is going on. Instead it is intellectual navel gazing of the worst kind and that too is strangely uninvolving as you read on.Other writers do this much much better. Javier Marias for one has such personality to his writing that you don't care where he digresses to nor how complex the philosophy. This book feels like a writerly intellectual exercise, extremely self conscious and unengaging for the reader.2 stars because the basic story idea was a good one and she can write but she doesn't deliver.

Es passiert nicht viel in diesem Roman. Doch was passiert, schreibt Katie Kitamura so dicht und packend, dass sie einen komplett hineinzieht in die innere Welt ihrer Protagonistin. Mosaikstück für Mosaikstück fügt sich das Bild einer gescheiterten Ehe zusammen und bleibt doch bruchstückhaft. Genau wie das Bild, das jeder Mensch von seinem Gegenüber hat. Niemand kennt den Anderen jemals ganz. Ein mysteriöses Buch. Sehr gut geschrieben. Unaufgeregt spannend erzählt - das ist in diesem Fall kein Widerspruch. Sehr empfehlenswert.

This novel intrigued me at first as the blurb suggests it is about secrets in a marriage, but as I read the first few chapters I realised it is a confused mix of obfuscation and travelogue. The main character, unnamed, sets off to find her husband from whom she is estranged but not yet divorced. She is commanded to do so by her mother-in-law, who presents me with my first major issue with this novel – Isabella is just so unconvincing as a character! Her ridiculously imperious tone set my teeth on edge, and conveniently, she is so wealthy that she can make people do whatever she wants. Hmm.In Greece, the woman begins to discover that her husband has been leading a strange double life and as she uncovers his secrets, she learns more about the disintegration of her marriage. However, I was unable to enjoy this book for several reasons, not least the two-dimensional characters, such as Christopher and Isabella, that Kitamura has created. The narrative is stilted and awkward - always striving for effect and never quite getting there: “But until a decision is acted upon, it is only hypothetical, a kind of thought experiment: I had decided to ask Christopher for a divorce but I had not yet committed the act, I had not looked at him and spoken the words. It was important, this act of enunciation, these words, or rather this one word – divorce- which thus far had been notably absent from our conversation, and which, once spoken, would change the course of our separation inalterably.” I find this to be clunky and convoluted and this style of writing is pretentious and makes for difficult reading. This ponderous way of telling us that she is reluctant to press ahead with the divorce is typical of the narrator’s style. There is a pompousness in the tone throughout that makes her a very unsympathetic character.There are also simple continuity errors: “the drizzle of rain” on P60 is suddenly “the dry heat” on P62.But the worst crime in the book is the atrocious punctuation, where the crime of comma-splicing is committed on every page. No, in every paragraph! It made this English teacher very cross. “The houses were built from concrete rather than stone, entirely charmless, it was true there was nothing much to see.” And how about this for a sentence? “That we would sink beneath the weight of this rubble, the line between death and life was not impermeable, people and matters persist.”What does it mean? In the end, that is my problem with this book. It sounds meaningful, but it really isn’t.

There is no denying that A Separation is well written, and the author’s tone is confident throughout. Yet, although it was a great premise and concept - something was missing that I can’t quite put my finger on.I think I would have personally preferred to have got to know the protagonist in a little more depth, but I just felt like we were never quite given enough inner access to her thoughts or actions to build up a better picture.I did find the relationship with the in-laws very well handled, in particular the mother-in-law aspect which I know of all too well!However, the resolution failed to materialise, and I found that after reading it, there was a sense of something else still to come that the book just didn’t quite deliver on.Chapter 7 was quite unexpected, and I felt at this point the story would take a different turning. Not so much in the way of action, but more in the form of further in-depth realisations about the couple. But it just never really got there.I did enjoy the book, but perhaps I needed something more in the way of a resolutionBut that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is one good writer who I would happily read more of.Though I did think of giving it 3 stars, I think it deserves 4 for the many snippets of prose I found myself nodding my head to as well as highlighting in the book! More so, I did read it all the way through because I wanted to and yes, I did enjoy the reading experience.There is no doubt whatsoever that Katie is a fantastic writer who knows how to evoke, but this story was a little bit of a damp squib in the end. But there is great potential here, I just didn’t find that this book hit the mark as well as it could have done.However, I do think A Separation is worth reading, if not to form your own opinion, but to see for yourself how good a writer Katie actually is.

“ A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, alone, she gets word that her ex-husband has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged southern Peloponnese. Reluctantly she agrees to go and search for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. Adrift in the wild and barren landscape, she traces the failure of their relationship, and finds that she understands less than she thought about the man she used to love.A story of intimacy, infidelity and compassion, A Separation is about the gulf that divides us from the lives of others and the narratives we create to mask our true emotions. As the narrator reflects upon her love for a man who may never have been what he appeared, Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on the brink of catastrophe. A Separation is a riveting masterpiece of absence and presence that will leave the reader astonished, and transfixed.”I found that this book is written in a very distanced style and found it quite slow moving. The write up makes it sound very exciting but unfortunately I found it just a little dull at times.